Trylove

Look past the false one-take! Look deeply into the grotesque detail underneath the post-intellectualist veneer! ROPE is a tightly wound tool of class violence, spotlighting the evil, anti-moralizing pragmatism of the elitist class. THE MINNEAPOLIS HITCHCOCK FESTIVAL (until Oct 6): https://www.trylon.org/films/category/the-minneapolis-hitchcock-festival/ Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/...

Content warning: Discussions of sex work, abuse, and suicide. Kuniko is a woman stuck between who she was – a prostitute – and who she wants to be: an accepted member of a society that’s actively cracking down on people with her history. In asking whether it’s society’s responsibility to accept Kinuko or her responsibility to ‘reform,’ GIRLS OF THE NIGHT doesn’t go as far as you might want in norm...

WWII veteran Reikichi ghostwrites letters for Japanese prostitutes to send to their American GI boyfriends. One of those women happens to be Michiko, Reikichi’s lifelong flame – and, as a staunch nationalist and traumatized veteran, he doesn’t approve of her consorting with Japan’s former enemy. Can he suppress his loyalist purism long enough to recognize the humanity of the person he claims to lo...

In Disney’s fifth animated feature, nature maintains and sustains an otherwise rote plot. This episode is a bit silly. But it’s a great discussion. I think so, at least. Manny Farber’s 1942 review of BAMBI for The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/134248/saccharine-symphony CRACKING OPEN THE DISNEY VAULT (Sept at the Trylon): https://www.trylon.org/films/category/cracking-open-the-disn...

Falling in the middle of actress-turned-director Kinuyo Tanaka’s directing work, FOREVER A WOMAN (titled in Japanese as THE ETERNAL BREASTS) is an unflinching portrait of a woman seeking to define herself against the assumptions the world makes about her. After divorcing her unfaithful husband, Fumiko is diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer on the cusp of a lucrative poetry career. The people w...

Content warning: This episode includes mention of sexual assault. Joyce Chopra’s haunting narrative debut follows Connie, a 15-year-old on summer vacation who slowly and unintentionally lands in the orbit of a man who calls himself Arnold Friend (“a friend”). Amid the throes of family drama, discovering her own burgeoning sexuality, and under the increasingly intense gaze of the men around her, Co...

Featuring guest Dan Nagan of Everything We Learned (https://twitter.com/adapperdanman)! Red and Mandy live in remote, mountainous California. Jeremiah Sand wants Mandy for his own. When he finally gets her and finds out he can’t earn her love, fealty, or fear, he burns her alive in front of her beloved. Red, newly given to the righteous, hellacious power of grief, embarks on a bloodbath rampage to...

Featuring guest Nick Kouhi (​​https://twitter.com/kouhi_nick)! The debut of Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel is hot – but in an uncomfortable, sweaty, drenched kind of way. The matriarch of a rural summer home is bedridden after a drunken poolside injury; her cousin brings her family to tend house; her children play with guns in the woods and fish with machetes; there might be a monster lurki...

With writer and former Trylon volunteer Nazeeh Alghazawneh (https://twitter.com/naazeeehh)! In the bones of ELECTRA, MY LOVE, there sits one of the most important Greek myths. But the surface of Miklós Jancsó’s anti-Soviet retelling is reserved for a more direct comment on eternal cycles of power, the need for change in those who hold it, and the effect it has on those subject to it. Comprising on...

When $300,000 goes missing in New York City – a numbers racket payout of both Italian and black mob money – cops, mafiosi, and gangsters alike chase down every lead to get it back. In ACROSS 110TH STREET, lines are drawn between cops and criminals, wealthy and poor, white and black, neighborhoods and ghettos. Jim Harris, an impoverished Black man with a disability, plans to take advantage of all t...

Featuring special guest Abbie Phelps ( https://twitter.com/goodhunterabbie)! DRIVE ANGRY is not a very good movie. In fact, it’s kind of a piece of shit. But like a lot of piece of shit movies, it’s far more charming, fun, and likeable than the sum of its parts would lead you to believe. Nic Cage is John Milton (yeah), a man back from hell who seeks revenge on cult leader Jonah King (yeah) for kil...

Content warning: Discussions of sexual violence and abuse. Neither Jodorowsky’s most remembered film nor his most surreal, SANTA SANGRE is still a horror-drama marked by its many allusions to faith, guilt, responsibility, and triumph of the self over evil. Fenix, a young circus performer, is left forever scarred when his father kills his mother and then himself. Years later, he gets what he thinks...

*** Note: This episode was originally recorded and released in June 2019 during a series on the films of Joel and Ethan Coen at the Trylon. We've republished it to coincide with the Trylon's showing of RAISING ARIZONA as part of the NIC CAGE: NATIONAL TREASURE series that screened in the summer of 2022. We didn't really know what we were doing with this show back then, but we're still pretty happy...

Featuring special guest Natalie Marlin ( https://twitter.com/NataliesNotInIt)! Screened only once at release before it was banned during the Iranian cultural revolution, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s CHESS OF THE WIND (aka THE CHESS GAME OF THE WIND) is still shocking after more than 40 years in obscurity. Focusing on the lurid power plays conducted behind the closed doors of an aristocrat’s mansion (inc...

With returning guest and Trylon volunteer Finn Odum (https://twitter.com/Finnematic)! Maybe the question isn’t whether CON AIR is ‘sincere’ or not. Maybe it’s more like “What’s it doing to leverage action tropes to comment on the American carceral state?” or “Is it possible to rehabilitate a whole society?” or “Is Steve Buscemi even real in this movie?” or “Why is John Malkovich in this movie?” Li...

With returning guest Sarah Huisken of the Cult Film Collective! THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE is plot-light but craft-heavy. Its French style takes inspiration from many eras and regions of animation to build a descriptive, sometimes unsettlingly detailed picture of a fictional city and its unique inhabitants. With Sarah, we pull apart what exactly the movie is doing with its technical achievements,...

A bunch of people in Virgil, Texas, are gearing up for the sesquicentennial celebration – the Celebration of Specialness – and in TRUE STORIES, David Byrne of Talking Heads is your guide to the lifestyles, traditions, and movers & shakers of the oddball town. In this episode, we discuss the kind of world Byrne and company imagined in TRUE STORIES, the assumptions its inhabitants make about the...

Featuring special guest Dan Nagan (@aDapperDanMan)! What is even going on in John Woo's FACE/OFF? The simplest conceit – swap badass criminal Nic Cage and sadboy cop John Travolta's faces for max irony – is stretched beyond its reasonable boundaries and into truly bizarre territory. How can two whole men live as half of each other? What do they become when united in flesh and singular purpose? Thr...

With returning guest Charlie Mackin (https://twitter.com/charliemander13)! Frank thinks he’s supposed to save lives. Frank’s got it backwards. Join us in discussing BRINGING OUT THE DEAD: number two in the Trylon’s Nic Cage summer series, one of the black sheep of Martin Scorsese’s filmography, and a stylized-but-intimate look at what motivates and depresses EMTs. Stick around for our takes on the...

Featuring the first appearance of writer, Trylon volunteer, Horrorthon body counter, and comms specialist Michael Popham! A direct sequel to the movie where Godzilla rips Mechagodzilla’s head off, TERROR OF MECHAGODZILLA is a movie (written by newcomer Yukiko Takayama!) where Godzilla rips Mechagodzilla’s head off… and there’s a dinosaur… being controlled by aliens… who’ve teamed up with a disgrac...

MOONSTRUCK is a perfect film made in 1987 by Norman Jewison and written by John Patrick Shanley. Loretta (played by Cher), a neurotic Italian woman in her mid-30s, is set to marry Johnny (Danny Aiello), a neurotic Italian man in his mid-40s, even though she doesn’t really love him. She meets his brother Ronny (Nic Cage) and falls into a whirlwind romance that starts to crumble her idea of what she...

Content warning: Discussions of sexual assault and domestic abuse. Featuring special guest Audrey Callerstrom ( https://twitter.com/schmaudrey)! CHERRY FALLS exists in the “sardonic horror-comedy” genre, but even at that, it’s somewhat more pessimistic than its contemporaries. A brutal serial murderer targets virgins with no clear motive, and the implications ripple throughout the East Coast town...

Like much of the GODZILLA franchise, GHIDORAH: THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER is more focused on the fun of watching giant monsters duke it out and the innate humor in their skyborne rivalries. While the story is less about Godzilla himself, it’s a superb example of what made mid-career GODZILLA movies so special and worth discussing: Like a great martial arts movie, it’s a case study in integrating hum...

The original GODZILLA is a lot more up-front about its mission statement than later entries would lead you to believe. It was concepted and written as a metaphor for Japan’s traumatic response to nuclear tragedy and fear of another, but it’s remembered more for its genre-defining special effects. But with a focus on a melodramatic love triangle and humans who can’t decide if they’re heroes or horr...

Emily Csuy of Stoop Kidz!: A Hey Arnold! Podcast is back behind the mic to kick off the Trylon’s Agnès Varda series with CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962)! Florence, who sings and performs under the stage name Cléo (short for “Cléopatra”), is reeling after she’s diagnosed with cancer. The movie picks up during a tarot reading that spells her imminent doom, and the rest of the film tracks the following two h...